Praise the sun

Take a look at this video:


That is one seriously large solar farm. In fact, when completed it will cover 4,700 acres and provide enough energy to power 180,000 households.

It is really promising that something of this scale is being built,  but there is still so much work to be done to improve the efficiency of these devices. Solar power isn't going to win the land use per megawatt battle any time soon.

A Stabilisation Goal; drawing it all together

So how does what we've learnt about the 2 degree C target link back to my scepticism? Well I think I can make two key points out of my reading on dangerous climate change targets.

The 2 degree C target emerged from a need to motivate:

• Simply saying that we needed to avoid dangerous climate change failed to promote action. Meta-targets are a vital tool for translating climate change research into global policy
• Where the issue at hand requires global cooperation, the likes of which has never been seen, a common and definitive goal is a vital (Geden, 2013).

The Issues:

• The prevalent 2 degree C meta-target has been built upon a flawed danger threshold approach
• As these flaws have been brought to light the meta-target has lost authority.

The past success of the 2 degree C target is now almost a thorn in the side of the climate change community.

• To shed the target now could undermine the progress achieved in motivating the public and politicians over the past decade
• Climate change sceptics have a history of criminalising backtracking within the climate science community, despite this being a normal response to new evidence.
• Take for example this point raised on yahoo answers of all places:

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20140520011715AA9EM73 

• While the target is presently more political than it is scientific, it is likely the scientific community who will take the greatest hit to their credibility from efforts to abandon it.

• As Geden (2013) points out:

‘Any associated loss of credibility could, some claim, seriously reduce what momentum remains in international decarbonization efforts’

So it looks like I started reading with one question in mind, “How do we decide a level to stabilise the climate at?”, and ended up with many more. No wonder so many people feel overwhelmed by the idea of climate change mitigation

But don’t you worry, in my next few posts I’ll hopefully end up answering a few of them. 

Secret Link

The 2 Degree C Target

OK so just a recap of my last (serious) post:

• Many climate change impacts can be considered from an acceptability threshold” perspective. However, it is not possible to draw a single line in the sand that best deals with all these impacts.
• Even more problematic are the climate change impacts that do not conform well to threshold thinking. Where impacts ramp up (in many cases linearly), determining what qualifies as unacceptable becomes a subjective and ethics heavy task.

The more I read on the topic of dangerous climate change, the more my scepticism of the concept of ‘dangerous climate change thresholds’ seems justified.

I think this quote from Mahoney (2013) sums up my opinion on avoidable climate change targets well:

‘a stale variable which offers an illusion of control and a facade of simplicity’

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The 2 Degree C Target:

So drawing this all back towards the overall aim of this blog, why do I think this is concerning for making stabilisation scenarios achievable? One way to answer this question is to look at the 2 degrees of warming target.

A bit of context:

Jordan et al. (2013) put forward that the target was first developed in response to criticism of the vagueness of UNFCCC’s Article 2 statement:

‘stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’

The figure was designed to add substance to the statement and motivate action to achieving this goal (Jordan et al., 2013). The 2 degrees C of warming was designed as a ‘meta-target’ and ‘boundary object’ (Randalls,2010) connecting the actions of policy makers with the scientific consensus that:

‘Deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required according to the science’ (this is a direct statement from the Cancun Agreements).

The target was essentially a clear deadline, intended to draw policy makers and the public’s attention towards long-term environmental goals.

It really is pretty basic behavioral stuff. Imagine you have been set two pieces of work, one with an exact deadline and the other requiring only that it be handed in at some point. Which one would you prioritise doing? Well, unless you defy behavioral theory, odds are you would forget about the second piece of work and instead focus upon the one with a certain deadline (Schneider et al., 2002). This is essentially the idea of short-shortsightedness in the face of uncertainty (the idea that we care more about things and events that are immediately relevant to us and more certain to occur).

So then, the target was essentially an attempt to motivate and rally policy makers and the public behind a common meta-target. And up until recently that was what it was doing.

The 2 degree C warming target gained much more political momentum than article 2 on its own. Jordon et al. (2013) point out that the goal achieved a ‘near totemic status’, especially within the EU. There have even been attempts to legally bind policy around this target (for example at the  Durban Platform).

Recent challenges to the 2 degree target

However, as the target gained status and legal traction, it quite rightly came under more intense scrutiny; and looking back at the criticism I raised in my last blog, this scrutiny highlighted some pretty big flaws.

Despite being considered as a boundary object by some between scientific research and policy, the target was increasingly recognised for what it was; a political construct (Geden, 2013)

 Geden (2013) sums it up well:

“Scientific research on climate change has reported numerous indications that 2°C could be an advisable guideline, but has not produced clear evidence that this precise figure is imperative”. A much smaller and larger warming target would be just as justifiable.

As politicians have realised this, the target has increasingly lost some of its power and purpose. For example, in 2012 US Climate Envoy Todd Stern called for the target’s removal from climate change talks (Jordon et al., 2013) 

Todd Stern adresssing the U.N in Copenhagen Getty Images

And now for something completely different

On a complete side note, I came across this today on a YouTube binge.

Perhaps I'm just a biased Peep Show fan, but I think a David Mitchell and Leonardo DiCaprio climate change tag team would definitely convert a few more people to the cause.

How do we determine a dangerous level of climate change?

As you can probably guess, this question is too big to really answer fully in one blog post (in fact you might struggle to cover every aspect in an entire series). So to avoid the risk of turning this blog into a textbook, I thought it would be best if I just cover the key interesting points:

A danger threshold

The UN’s definition of dangerous climate change really frames the issue around a kind of “acceptability threshold”. It promotes the idea that there is a distinct and quantifiable level of climate change, beyond which the impacts cross over into being dangerous. And in some contexts, this approach makes sense.

Thresholds are a major part of ecological research, especially when considering extinctions. The idea of Minimum Viable Population, where species populations can essentially be pushed to a threshold point beyond which they are doomed to go extinct without intervention, is a really fascinating one. At the same time, a lot of research is going into biome thresholds. Marengo et al., 2011 (as well as many others) have discussed the possibility of the Amazonian rain forest experiencing a tipping point into a savanna like state in response to continued warming (save the rain forest campaigns don’t seems quite as melodramatic knowing that).

Threshold thinking can also be useful when considering climate change impacts on the human world. Gitay et al., 2001 discuss the idea that global agricultural production may actually benefit from small levels of global warming, but transition into dangerous impacts at greater levels.

The table below (taken from the IPCC AR4 report) showcases a number of key impact thresholds and how it is possible to therefore to think about these issues from the “acceptability threshold” approach.

The issue is that this is not the case for all climate change impacts (Schellnhuber, 2006).Climate change is already believed to have contributed to the ‘global burden of disease and premature death’. Similarly, there is growing evidence of a ‘climate change signal’ in 20^th Century extinctions (Parmesan and Yohe, 2003). The point I’m trying to make then is that, in many respects, climate change impacts are already dangerous by the UN’s definition and appear to have already crossed an acceptability threshold.

Considering this, the issue of dangerous climate change transitions from one of “at what level do the impacts become dangerous” to “what level of danger is acceptable”. And as I’m sure you can see, this completely changes the issue at hand from an objective and generally quantifiable consideration, into a largely subjective and ethics heavy debate.

Take, for example, the issue of human health and climate change:

“World health experts have concluded with ‘‘very high confidence’’ that climate change already contributes to the global burden of disease and premature death.” (IPCC, 2007)

Put yourself in the shoes of a policy-maker informed of this. How would you go about establishing a level of unacceptable climate change? There are proposed solutions to this dilemma, (I’ve put a list of some interesting stuff below) but ultimately the point I want to get across is that:

• For many climate change impacts, a level of climate change considered dangerous becomes strongly dependent upon ethics and the opinions of ‘particular policy-makers’ (Schneider et al., 2006)

This Burning Ember’s diagram really expresses the issue, especially when compared to the more quantitative table above. While certain aspects of climate change conform to clear-cut threshold thinking (as proposed by the UN) the vast majority of impacts involve an element of subjectivity ( In fact this diagram was controversially excluded from the IPCC AR4 report because of this factor).The result is a difficulty in creating an agreeable and clear-cut target of dangerous climate change which we should avoid.

Hopefully you have now reached the point where you are rightfully asking "why have I heard so much about avoiding 2 degrees of warming then?". Well in my next post I'll go over that question, drawing everything I talked about back to the issue of a stabilisation target.  

Secret Link!

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Climate Change and Health:

An interesting paper on the differing regional effects on climate change on health. I raises more questions of whether it is useful to consider a dangerous level of CC on a global level, when the impacts are so closely tied to individual regions.  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7066/abs/nature04188.html

This chapter from the book “Coping with Global Environmental Change, Disasters and Security” is a good summary

 of some of the ethics of risk management in the context of Climate Change. It is long, but has been written with policy-makers in mind so is definitely worth a read.

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783642177750-c1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1068963-p174086661